What happens when a broker submits a deal on Openfund

If you have placed a private mortgage in Ontario in the past five years, you already know how the workflow runs. A borrower comes to you with a deal that does not fit the major banks. You assess the location. You review the appraisal. You work through the income documentation. You structure the deal so it has a chance of finding capital. Then the placement work begins.

You figure out which private lenders might fund it. You pull from your mental list of the MICs and individual lenders you have worked with. For a cleaner file — lower LTV, strong borrower, straightforward exit — you might send it to one or two lenders you trust will fund quickly. For a harder file — higher LTV, story credit, complex structure — you send it more broadly. Sometimes you reach out to lenders you have never worked with because the deal needs capital your usual relationships will not provide.

The submission is not one action. Every lender has its own intake. Some take submissions through Filogix or Finmo. Some want the package in a general inbox with the documents attached. Some take the LOS submission but expect you to message a specific underwriter directly. Each lender has its own document checklist and its own way it wants the deal summarized. You adapt each submission to where it is going. The variance is small per lender. It compounds across five or six or seven lenders.

Then you wait. You follow up. Twenty-four hours go by and you have one offer, or nothing, and you send the file to another lender. When an offer finally lands, you walk it back to your client. They ask if you shopped it around. You did, but you cannot prove the offer you are presenting is the best one on the market. You tell them you sent it to several lenders and a couple responded. You hope they take you at your word. Then you spend thirty to forty-five minutes producing the compliance documentation to close the file.

None of this is unprofessional work. It is what private mortgage origination in Ontario currently requires. The question is whether the workflow is still fit for purpose in a market that processed 65,233 private mortgage transactions worth $32 billion in 2024. Openfund was built to answer that question with a different workflow. The walkthrough below is what happens when you submit a private deal through it.

The submission

The deal arrives on the platform the way every private mortgage file already arrives at your desk: a borrower with a need, a property, and a story. You assess it the same way you always have. Your professional judgement does not change. What changes is everything that happens after you decide to place the deal.

You enter the application through the platform's submission interface. The property address auto-populates location data. The borrower fields capture the standardized intake your firm already produces. The supporting documents upload into the deal record — mortgage statement, property tax bill, income documentation, appraisal if you have it. You set the parameters: requested capital, lien position, target close date, the deadline by which you want offers.

The platform does what no submission tool currently does for private mortgages: it filters every eligible lender on Openfund against your specific deal in real time. Lenders whose criteria do not fit the property location, the lien position, the loan amount, the borrower credit profile, or any other gating criterion are filtered out before they see the deal. You do not have to remember which lenders work in which regions or who takes second-position deals up to what LTV. The platform knows.

The eligible lender pool

The moment you submit, the platform identifies every lender on Openfund whose stated criteria fit the deal. For a typical Ontario private mortgage, that is somewhere between five and fifteen lenders depending on the file. Some of them you already work with. Some of them you have heard of but never sent a deal to. Some of them you have never heard of at all.

The eligible lenders receive the deal as a standardized package. Same data, same documents, same format for each of them. They review on their own time, against their own internal process, and respond with offers directly through the platform.

The offers

Offers populate your dashboard as they arrive. Each one shows the rate, the fee structure, the conditions, the funding speed, and the lender's historical performance on Openfund — average funding time, conditions-to-close rate, reliability across previous deals on the platform. You are not just seeing what each lender claims. You are seeing what they have actually done.

You compare offers side by side in one interface in the time it takes you to read them. The sequential outreach is gone. The twenty-four hour wait per lender is gone. The “I sent it to three lenders and two responded” becomes “twelve lenders were eligible, eight reviewed the deal, and five made offers.” The proof that you shopped the file lives on the platform as a record.

You select the offer that fits your client. The platform notifies the lender. The deal moves into closing.

What you walk away with

When you select an offer, the platform generates the Openfund Report automatically. The report is a six-page document built from the application and the offers received. It shows your client their credit profile against prime, B lender, and private lender thresholds. It shows the competitive comparison — how the offer you recommended ranks against every other offer received on the file, by rate, by fee, by conditions, by funding speed. It documents your suitability assessment and the exit strategy you agreed on with the client. It captures their signed acknowledgment.

Two things happen because of this. First, the compliance documentation that currently takes thirty to forty-five minutes at the end of your day is generated as part of the workflow. The FSRA suitability assessment, the disclosures, the Form 1 — they exist as a byproduct of selecting an offer, not as a separate task. Second, the client conversation that used to end with “you have my word” now ends with a document that shows the client exactly how many lenders reviewed the deal and where the recommended offer ranked. The skepticism that drives borrowers to shop their broker's recommendation does not have anywhere to go. The proof is in their hands.

The work you did on the deal — the assessment, the structuring, the placement, the negotiation, the relationship — stays exactly what it was. What changes is the part of the workflow that never required professional judgement in the first place. The manual outreach. The sequential follow-up. The compliance paperwork at the end. That work is absorbed by the platform. The time you get back is time you can spend on what actually grows your business — building client relationships, finding your next opportunity, and serving the borrowers who depend on your judgement to navigate a market that is not getting any simpler.

Ontario's private mortgage market processed 65,000 transactions last year. The brokers who build better infrastructure now will define what this market looks like in five years. The submission workflow on Openfund is the first step.

Adam Mitchell is Co-Founder and Head of Broker Relations at Openfund. He has originated thousands of private mortgage deals as a licensed Ontario broker over the past decade.